THE INDESTRUCTIBLE TOM MCNALLY

Fire destroyed one boat. He built another and shipped it to St. Johns
Newfoundland. His passion: to beat Hugo Vilhen across the Atlantic in the
smallest boat. Violent storms ripped his sails and he had to be rescued. In
1992 he tried again out of southern Portugal only to be rammed by a
freighter. Twice he approached the Canary Islands to make repairs and to
provision and twice violent storms pushed him hundreds of miles off course.
Undaunted, Tom McNally persevered towards his objective... to cross the
Atlantic in the smallest boat ever. 113 days later, aboard “VERAHUGH”, all
of five feet, 4 ½ inches on deck, without fresh water and without food, he
reached Puerto Rico, his dream fulfilled.

Tom McNally, a native of Liverpool, England and with a heavy cockney
accent, learned to love the sea from an early age. He scraped up enough
money to buy his first boat, a 17 foot six inch twin keel day boat which he
christened “ANISOR which, when enunciated as Tom points out sounds like “AN
EYE SORE”. With absolutely no sailing experience, Tom headed for the West
Indies but ended up in Recife, Brazil, much the wiser. In the following
years, he next made four straightforward crossings of the Atlantic, three
with friends aboard a 34’ Rival and another aboard a slightly smaller boat.

Next, Tom built “VERA”, 12’6” on deck, at his home in Liverpool. In it he
sailed to the Canary Islands then on to Anguila, in the West Indies.
Dismasted part way across, adrift on the long Atlantic swells, he came up
with the “A” frame design that he built into his record setting boat.

In 1983 he built “BIG C”. 6’9” on deck and sailed her from St. Johns,
Newfoundland towards England. High winds blew out his sails and he drifted
for two weeks until, off the southern coast of Ireland, the “Yuri Kostikov”,
a large Russian trawler came to his rescue. The radioman had picked up a
message he understood to read “look out for six men in a boat” since the
original message received, “Look out for a man in a six foot boat” was
simply unreasonable. In high seas and winds gusting at over thirty five
knots, the trawler found McNally and positioned itself to leeward. Within
seconds, Tom found himself blown under the trawler’s towering stern. One of
the idling propellers gashed his boat. Tethered to the mast, Tom struggled
to bring his boat alongside the trawler. Using hand signals he got the
Russian crew to pass him heavy lines that he ran around under the hull and
around the keel pf his small boat. Meanwhile, a tender that had been lowered
to assist in the operation, approached, hit Tom and quickly separated.

With heavy ropes secured around the keel and the trawlers heavy boom
rigged outboard, the Russians tensed the lines and “BIG-C” leaped clear of
the ocean. The jerk caused Tom to lose his hold around the mast, slip and
drop, to hang suspended by the ten-foot rope tied to “Big-C’s” mast. As he
cleared the sea, his pants, pockets filled with water, slipped off.
Twenty-five foot seas tossed the trawler about and in turn Tom, holding on
for his life, swung in wild fifteen foot circles beneath “BIG-C”. Tom looked
down at the icy churning ocean. It was clear his only chance was to hang on.
The crew hesitated to swing the gyrating boat closer for fear that Tom would
smash into the hull. Minutes passed and Tom, wet and cold, tried time and
again to catch lines thrown to him. The boom operator swung Tom and his boat
towards a husky Russian sailor hanging on an upper deck who grabbed Tom,
upside down, in a bear hug, and brought him aboard. Minutes later “BIG-C”
rested on deck. Shaken, naked, half frozen and thankful to be alive, he
embraced his saviors. They in turn bantered and laughed. Tom, perplexed,
failed to catch on until one of the crew leaned over and said, “English men
not too beeg.”

Tom is from Liverpool and much of the hometown hero. He abandoned a
career as a teacher to pursue a life at sea. “VERAHUGH” was lovingly named
for his mother Vera and his father Hugh. He proudly tells all within earshot
that he’s known locally as “the crazy sailor” and proudly includes it when
signing fan mail and photos. His hero is Hugo Vilhen, midget solo sailor out
of Homestead, Florida, who in his five foot six inch boat held the
trans-Atlantic crossing record for the smallest boat. Tom prepared to go
after this record.

Early in 1992 he built a 5’ 2 inch boat in the second story of a small
shop. Virtually complete, he had but to slip it through a window, lower it
to the ground, and fasten the keel. Late one night, the shop caught fire.
The flames caused the floor to collapse and his almost ready-for-sea boat
fell to the ground, his hopes to cross the Atlantic destroyed beyond repair.

Undismayed, he immediately began to build “VERAHUGH-PRIDE OF MERSEYSIDE”,
close by the banks of the Mersey River. Ever short of funds, he found a
discarded wardrobe that became the backbone for his new boat. He laid foam
on the outside walls, molded it to the shape he wanted and then covered the
foam with fiberglass. Once the fiberglass set, he dug out the foam and
between the wardrobe and the outer hull, he built storage cabinets accessed
by a series of small ports. Within months his vessel was ready. As a hatch
he used the door to a washing machine, the type that has a plastic bubble.

Contrary winds out of Liverpool and the heavy traffic in the Channel
convinced Tom McNally that he’d be better off sailing from the continent. He
shipped “VERAHUGH” to Lisbon and traveled overland to meet her. A bus
dropped him off on Margino Road from where he could see the boat basin
across eight lanes of traffic and several railroad tracks. Confused with
traffic approaching from the left, opposite to that in England, Tom looked
the wrong way and got hit by a van, landing in a heap alongside the road.
The driver stopped, verified that Tom was alive and sped away. Tom,
bloodied, hurt, his clothes torn, worked his way across the busy highways to
this boat where the press anxiously awaited his scheduled arrival. He
quickly became a celebrity among the sailing community.

Many sailors came by to meet Tom while he loaded his boat for the long
crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Late one afternoon, two heavy set men who
had obviously been drinking walked out on the pier to gape at the miniature
ocean going cruiser “VERAHUGH” and the “crazy sailor”. With Tom looking the
other way, one of the men suddenly leaped aboard and let himself down
through the hatch. Within seconds the second man jumped on the deck and hung
on to the mast and sang out in Portuguese. Before Tom could react, the boat
tipped over, water poured into the hatch and the boat sank. The man in the
hatch struggled to escape but his jacket had caught on the hatch. Under
water, bubbles oozed from his nose. Tom leaped into the water, climber
aboard ‘VERAHUGH”, grabbed the man by the arms and pulled him out. With the
help of his friends, the intruder was hauled up to the finger pier and
revived. “VERAHUGH” meanwhile, oozed bubbles from its resting place on the
bottom. All electrical devices and stores, soaked in salt water, lay ruined.

Undaunted, Tom raised his mini-cruiser and once again prepared his little
vessel for sea. Winds off Lisbon were unfavorable and he followed
suggestions to have his boat trucked to southern Portugal. Violent storms
lashed the areas throughout December 1992. Twenty foot tides made navigation
hazardous. And, to make matters worse, the local police, the Portuguese
Guardia Fiscal in the small fishing port of Sagres, just West of Cape St.
Vincent, would not grant him permission to sail in an unquestionably
unseaworthy craft. Family and friends insisted he return to England for the
holidays but Tom refused. He wanted to sail in 1992 to commemorate the
crossing by Columbus on his Voyage of Discovery. He had 10 days to set sail.

Christmas eve found Tom alone, inside a borrowed fish locker decorated
with tiny bits of tinsel, home-made pudding, several rats, and Ernie
Shackleton as company. Ernie Shackleton was Tom’s pet hermit crab that had
stayed with Tom during several years. A good luck omen, Tom would resort to
discussing his dilemmas with Ernie, always a very patient listener.

Tom was stuck in Sagres. Local officials refused to allow him to sail
until he could produce ownership documentation, which he didn’t have since
it was not required in England for a vessel of his size. The Guardia kept a
watch on his boat continuously. On December 27, when the wind shifted to the
east, he decided this was the moment to dash out into the Atlantic. Tom
placed two bags of unusable gear on the dock and asked the Guardia to watch
his belongings while he tested his boat. He would be right back, Tom told
him.

A day later he found himself in the middle of the vessel separation
traffic lanes for shipping approaching and leaving the Mediterranean from
the North. With his flashlight and VHF radio he contacted an endless line of
ships until his water soaked electrics gave out. At that moment, a mammoth
freighter approached dead on. He signaled with his light but was unable to
radio. He rowed frantically. The freighter came upon his tiny craft. The bow
wave flung him away from the hull but the suction of the hull brought him
back in. “VERAHUGH” bumped along the side of the towering vessel while Tom
attempted to fend off with his paddle. Afraid he was going to be sucked in
by the propellers he tried to seal himself in by closing the hatch only to
find that his harness, clamped to the mast, prevented the hatch from closing
tightly. When he whipped off his harness, the side of the ship tore it
loose. As the stern passed, “VERAHUGH” was left holed and half full of
water. Shivering and shaken, Tom pumped all night. A day later, out of the
shipping lanes, he found he was unable to reach the damage from either the
inside of outside. He would have to put into port for repairs. Even worse,
Ernie Shackleton was gone, lost while he frantically bailed. Now he was
truly alone.

Winds faired out of the North and pushed him towards the Canary Islands.
Two weeks later he approached Sta. Cruz on the island of Tenerife. While in
the process of making his final approach, a violent storm surged from the
south. Through six rough days and nights Tom struggled to keep his tiny
craft on course. Shortly after midnight on the sixth day, Tom found himself
off the harbor of Funchal in Madeira. Fifty feet off the breakwater, the
wind died and he rowed. He measured headway in inches. On the 2nd of
February, 1993, he set foot once again on land.

He repaired the crack in the hull and set sail anew for the Canary
Islands. Days later another violent storm surged from the North which pushed
him down towards the Cape Verde Islands. He checked his dead reckoning and
sextant positions with a weekly GPS fix. Both confirmed he had been pushed
down to 14 degrees North, much lower than his planned course to Puerto Rico.
Unable to sail any closer than 80 degrees to the wind with his twin jibs and
no main, Tom worked his way North in a series of steps as the wind shifted
from South to East. His water maker failed and to stay alive he continued to
drink its salt laden product. On May he drifted under El Morro and into San
Juan Harbor, 113 days out of Sagres, 25 pounds lighter, his kidneys near
failure.

Embraced by all in Puerto Rico and showered with hospitality he prepared
“VERAHUGH” for its final leg: to Ft. Lauderdale. His track, winds
permitting, would take him south of Great Inagua, on to the Great Bahama
Bank and then up the Gulf Stream to Florida. His future plans: to marry the
love of his life, Edna, and settle down... until, of course, there is
another record to break . While “VERAHUGH” was hauled at the San Juan Bay
Marina he lovingly studied her lines and said to me, “You know, mate, I
could take 8 inches off her and....”